Monarchy to balance celebration with awareness of the complex relationship between British subjects and their ruler
Rehearsals were underway this week for Saturday’s coronation of Charles III and his wife Camilla.
It will be the 40th such ceremony held at Westminster Abbey since 1066. The service will feature the rite’s usual key elements – the recognition; the oath; the anointing; the investiture and crowning; and the enthronement and homage – but will depart from tradition in some respects.
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It will begin, for instance, with Charles being greeted by a 14-year-old chorister, to whom the King will say: “I come not to be served but to serve.” And whereas previous coronations featured a “Homage of Peers”, this one will have an “Homage of the People”, which will involve the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby inviting everyone – both in the abbey and watching at home – to pledge allegiance to the King.
Most diverse coronation in British history
The coronation will be the most diverse such ceremony in British history. It will, for the first time, include female bishops and leaders of other faiths, as well as languages other than English. There will be a prayer in Welsh – Charles was the longest-serving Prince of Wales ever – and a hymn sung in both Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic. At the very end of the service, the King will be greeted by a group of peers representing the Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and Buddhist communities – or “neighbours in the faith”, as they will be called. This part will not be amplified so that the rabbi may observe Shabbat regulations, which forbid the use of a microphone on the Jewish day of rest.
The service is due to be attended by some 2,000 guests – about a quarter of the number that attended the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 – including about 100 foreign heads of state. Among the congregation will be Prince Harry, US First Lady Jill Biden and the singer Lionel Richie, who is chairman of The Prince’s Trust’s Global Ambassador Group. MPs and campaigners decried China’s decision to send Vice-President Han Zheng as its representative – a man regarded as the architect of Beijing’s crackdown on freedom in Hong Kong. Some were also unhappy about the attendance of Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Féin’s leader in Northern Ireland. O’Neill said she hoped her presence would help “build good relations between the people of these islands”.
Almost half the nation plan to watch
I attended a party the other day at which a guest turned up with a King Charles III tea towel as a gift, said Charlotte Ivers in The Sunday Times. Neither she nor the host “could quite work out whether the gift was ironic or not”, but everyone loved it. That sums up the “complex British relationship with our royal family”. Most of us affect not to care about the monarchy, yet polls suggest that almost half of us plan to watch the coronation, and millions of us will happily join in with the festivities at street parties on Sunday.
I won’t be celebrating, said Norman Baker in The Guardian. What’s the point of blowing an estimated £100m on some “huge candy-floss PR event for the royals”? There’s no legal need for a coronation at all. Every other European monarchy dispensed with this archaic rite decades ago. Spain’s last one was in 1555.
We’ve been treated to lots of negative views like this lately from parts of the media, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. The BBC and others have gone out of their way to interview critics and to instigate debates about whether the royals cost too much or have lost the support of the young. This is unrepresentative – given that a clear majority of the public think the monarchy is “broadly a good thing and should stay” – and rather mean-spirited. A coronation is not the right moment for such arguments.
On the contrary, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian, it’s a perfectly appropriate moment. We can all relate to royal births, marriages and funerals on a personal level. But there’s no real-life equivalent of a coronation, which showcases “the institution of monarchy, stripped of its human softening edges”, giving us a clearer perspective on it. In this context, it was foolish to incorporate a new “Homage of the People” into the ceremony. The idea, which reportedly originated in Lambeth Palace, has not been well received, and no wonder: to a public that mostly regards the royals with “benign apathy”, it sounds “positively feudal”. The fuss over the oath of allegiance will be forgotten soon enough, but the irritated response to it “shows what a tightrope” the royal family is walking.
Reign on the parade
Officials have written to the anti-monarchist campaign group Republic, warning its members about a new anti- disruption law that took effect this week, reports The Guardian. The Home Office claims the timing of the introduction of the new powers is coincidental.
Early forecasts suggest that rain may fall on the King’s parade, just as it did on those of his mother and grandfather, says The Daily Telegraph. Britain experienced what was described as “really quite miserable weather” when Elizabeth II was crowned; and 8.2mm of rain fell on the day of George VI’s coronation in 1937.
